Videogames used to be made by computer nerds who loved D&D and Star Trek and LOTR. Now they are made by drama club kids and people who went for art school for fashion design and watch Bridgerton.
They used to watch Star Wars and LOTR and play video games when they got off from developing video games now game devs watch the Big Bang theory and have a wall of funko pops
Like Asmon said in similar discussion; not just usual drama kids, but "loser" drama kids who want revenge to society (their words not mine). As we see, they made it with hate and rage, not -passion- love nor fun
Anyone ever notice how they gaslight us by saying "technology" issue as to why women in western games aren't scanned right. But for some reason eastern games don't have that problem? Weird
9:40 Remember that woman who tried to frame her father to be a deadbeat dad only to be proven wrong and be exposed as a rich spoiled brat. She's a writer 😂
12:50 Don't forget the fact that back in the day it wasn't all that easy to push out updates. Companies had to make stable games because they knew the players wouldn't always be able to get the updates.
It’s just no excuse anymore, black myth wukong came out smooth as butter, stellar blade was great and so as warhammer. These companies CAN make a fixed game but they just wanna meet the release date, imagine someone sells you a busted lawnmower for double the price for more cheaper and efficient lawnmowers and says they’ll fix it over time
Speaking as a QA manager, I can say this: Complexity of testing scales exponentially with software complexity, while coding complexity actually scales linearly. The problem is that a lot of QAs(in my experience) coming up with the 'What to test' thinks like a developer, so they miss A LOT of things. Simple example using PoE: In coding, we will probably develop the passive skills, the active gems, and the support gems separately and the code is isolated, and the effort is 3n. However, in testing, we should consider the combination effects of all 3, so the test scenarios should be n^3.
The nicer version I get called on the daily is right wing. On the daily. Said friend has a BA in English. Also has TDS. But I've met all sorts of people.
One of my Facebook posts got flagged for "False information" when all it showed was: Kamala Harris: "Unburdened by what has been." Marx: "Unburdened by what has been."
I think a major reason for such poor implementation of politics is that the writers don't actually UNDERSTAND their own beliefs. So much "agenda" is what I refer to as "Find-and-Replace Analogy": I want to talk about immigration. Find: "Mexicans", Replace: "Twi'leks". Find "America", Replace "Empire". Message: "Look how evil the Empire is for rejecting all these Twi'lek refugees!" An honest, thoughtful analysis begins with the understanding that the hot-button issue is just an extension of a core belief. Immigration, for example, is an extension of "Duty of Care": Who is how responsible for providing what, to whom? This is a genuine debate about balancing the needs of your family versus the needs of your neighbor's family, and how much you can - or should - sacrifice to help others, even if your own family suffers as a result. There are SO many metaphors you can work with at that level, and so many different positions you can take if circumstances change! It makes you THINK, which is what this kind of messaging is SUPPOSED to do.
@rumham8124 I wish lol. "What are your qualifications?" "I've made a mediocre DnD setting, I've played Dragon Age: Origins, and I think The Rings of Power sucks." "Are you willing to relocate to Southern California?" "Not a snowball's chance in hell." "When can you start?"
@fvb7 I'm thinking of titling it "Political Propaganda in Expositional Dialogue in Media and the Problem of Subtext (Or the Lack Thereof)". What do you think? Too punchy?
SO true. Even their attempts to get people from other "identities" or whatever is a total failure. I'm a woman and usually end up insulted by these "overcome your ovaries" storylines that they keep dishing out. Just give us game play and immersion!! It shouldn't be that hard.
Dev here, Going to give my two cents. Yes you can say devs are lazy, I agree to an extent but I would also say we are lazy by nature. Asmon is also right to an extent. However, working for a corporate company is simply far too fragmented and I always go back to the video by one of the founders of Fall Out, as it’s true, devs are capped at the pace they can move primarily due to corporate product driven frameworks like scrum. This means a small change instead of for a small studio where QA speaks to dev, dev fixes, it turns into, qa raises a ticket, ticket has to go through PO, PO has to refine ticket, ticket gets stuck in backlog, another dev then eventually get to the ticket with an over inflated time estimate, it then takes 5x as long to fix. It’s just a slow and painful process cause by business scrum frameworks that are product driven instead of a healthy balance that you get in small companies where people have more of a voice.
The reason this "relying on the customer being stupid" thing is working less and less with time is because players are becoming disillusioned with the companies they once blindly trusted. Its all about the pattern recognition. One bad game is whatever, two in a row is disappoining, but whatever, three in a row is suspicious, four in a row solidifies the pattern, and is seen as a fundamental flaw with the way the companies are making the games. They've relied on this tactic for too long, and its run its course, as all things do. Its caught up to them
There are tons of games with politics, racism, slavery, religion , and so on. It was never a problem. How many rpgs have a race that people dislike? For whatever reason. Or a race of slaves. Almost all of them. No one cared. They were well done, and most were very thought-provoking. Making you consider the morality and choices you were making. Now they have decided we are too dumb to understand these things or are too dumb to handle the nuance. So they have to smack us in the face with it. We should be in a golden age of the most intelligent and creative writers. Yet somehow it is worse than even 10 years ago. I can deal with bugs, glitches, and even graphics not being great. I can't deal with terrible writing, handholding, and forcing your views on me. I'm happy to play a game covering heavy topics as mentioned. As long as it's involved in the story and intelligently done.
Propaganda used to be a bit more cleverly implemented. I like reading sci-fi novels from the 60s, 70s and 80s and finding the social engineering of the time. It's mainly feminism, sexual liberation, anti-nuclear, anti-communist and pro-environmental messages.
Wait until the woke censors learn that slavery still exists in 2024 in many, many nations around the world. And, shock horror, their political crusade has done… (checks notes)… nothing to end slavery.
Exactly. Dei isn’t the problem, it’s when it’s forced, I don’t like force situations, I don’t want a gay character just because he’s gay or stereotypical gay.Ff16 did well with Dion, a gay character, you only know because he’s in love with one of his soldiers but his sexuality isn’t his motives to fight.
When will people realize that there is a huge difference between political themes and an actually agenda being pushed into a game by trillionares. This shit doesn't affect only a couple of games, it does affect most companies in the west and probably the conpany you work for too. ESG (which every company chases) - pushes DEI in every shape or way possible to get as much funding as possible. Games are bad now because of greed which resulted in the DEI. They hirrd based on DEI without a single thought and replaced / forced out all their talent which made the amazing games of the past. Now you have all this studios filled with DEI hires and activists and are suprised that they only produce crap.
Master Samwise (great channel btw) did a video very recently talking about the nuances of politics in storytelling and I'd highly recommend it. I agree when people say it IS impossible to keep politics out of storytelling, but there are ways to authentically present an idea 'within' a narrative. To some, an idea will 'always' be seen as political, depending on your worldview. It behooves a good writer, not to use a narrative as an excuse to bludgeon you with the idea. To have the story be the voice conveying that idea, not to have the voice of the writer lecturing you. A very recent example, off the top of my head. Consider the difference between Andor and The Acolyte. You could be forgiven for forgetting they came out of the same studio.
As someone who worked in Games QA, I want to answer the question Asmon asked @20:19. While working on Alien: Isolation, the entire QA team for that game was pulled into an office and screamed at by the QA managers for not inputting enough bugs each week towards the end of the testing period, before the game was going to platforms for certification to be on their systems. Keep in mind at this time, the Alien team had the largest portion of QA testers working on the game, while the other projects continued to do their work simultaneously. So absolutely this happens in games, but I do want to add an additional comment that while it seems to be on the lowest level of QA testers that are the problem, the real problem stems from the top down. Production puts the pressure on the Devs, which puts the pressure on to the QA teams. It all rolls downhill. It's especially soul crushing as a QA, when you see the game you've worked on is still riddled with issues, including ones that you know were inputted into the bug database, and were never addressed due to the lack of time that the upper management has forced onto both the Dev and QA teams. The upper management and Production teams are filled with the types of people that expect 9 women can give birth to a baby in 1 month, when we all know that it's going to take 9 months regardless of how many people are trying.
So basically Investors > Upper Management > Devs > QA > Customers. Unrealistic deadlines most likely the main issue and in turn the tail which are the customers get fked.
@@MrRaynx3 Pretty much yeah. Also a lot of QA testers are customers themselves. Truly they want what the general public want but often can’t even express their concerns with the project without it being dismissed. Hell even things like in game stores are the very last thing that the testers will have to make sure works, mostly because it’s the very last thing that gets added into a game. It’s always as disappointing to us as it is to customers to see higher ups push these decisions that we know will be disliked by everyone.
So its like everything else, too big to fail and too big to operate properly. So now we're stuck with another industry that won't be allowed to die and we have to create gaming welfare.
I think the author behind the original books was/is considered to be transphobic. The developers attempted to adjust for this when making their game to distance from the author. Orson Scott Key made Enders game, but he's quite homophobic. Still an awesome story worth telling and worth sharing, but some people choose to consider include an entire person's character for the art they make.
So trans activists were boycotting Hogwarts because of JK Rowling's stance on trans people. The studio thought the backlash was enough to warrant them to add a trans character last minute to try to please those people, but it didn't work.
From an active game dev in AAA environment perspective, games are full of bugs, not because of game dev laziness, but because of overscoping. Upper management are so greedy of packing games full of things and cutting cost its simply insane and unrealistic. That leads to bugs. Oh and thats not even at mid leadership /production level. This is all the way up, the product owners essentially.
More governments need start making steps that The Netherlands and even Australia have made. Context: Netherlands is well on their way to outright banning loot boxes in games bought in their country. (I don't know if this well end with requiring devs to be able to turn off the feature or outright banning the entire game.) Australia has changed their video game classification to require games with loot boxes be Rated-M.
You can not buy them in the Netherlands some games are blocked, some do not give the option and some ask if you are Dutch and if you say no you can buy them
DEI is easy and valuable investor money. Thats why publishers go down this route. It's often not even about the ideology... it's about to attracting investors that are willing to invest money to push these agendas using this media... and there are a lot of them... the trade-off for the devs is having to comply and to hire diverstiy instead of competence...
They don't make games for them. They are just chasing the ESG money which they have for a while now and they will do anything for more. That's the reason they hire consultant firms like SBI on top so that they achieve the next quota to gain even more funding. They are helping in creating the modern audience.
A lot of people miss the point of the "Modern Audience". They're not catering to the miniscule audience that exist now, they're trying to create the "Modern Audience" in the next generation.
Hello -- QA guy here. The problem with QA isn't the scaled up complexity. QA is done either in house by generally understaffed departments or outsourced (generally with disastrous results). QA is done on an extremely strict schedule, with proper iteration time and resolution time not part of the equation. QA now is supposed to find only the most egregious issues and get those into a resolution pipeline, but oftentimes what QA finds are bugs that are considered 'shippable'. To be fair, these often aren't the biggest deal, but sometimes they can be indicative of bigger problems that would've benefited from investigation. In short, the reason big AAA games don't have stable releases is because it's simply not a priority compared to the schedule and the cost, which has scaled up, but nowhere near to a reasonable degree.
Dev here, Going to give my two cents. Yes you can say devs are lazy, I agree to an extent but I would also say we are lazy by nature. Asmon is also right to an extent. However, working for a corporate company is simply far too fragmented and I always go back to the video by one of the founders of Fall Out, as it’s true, devs are capped at the pace they can move primarily due to corporate product driven frameworks like scrum. This means a small change instead of for a small studio where QA speaks to dev, dev fixes, it turns into, qa raises a ticket, ticket has to go through PO, PO has to refine ticket, ticket gets stuck in backlog, another dev then eventually get to the ticket with an over inflated time estimate, it then takes 5x as long to fix. It’s just a slow and painful process cause by business scrum frameworks that are product driven instead of a healthy balance that you get in small companies where people have more of a voice.
Man, I've been a QA at EA and the main issue there is the bug prioritisation. The game producers knew about the number of bugs that any game had at launch, but still decided to ship the game like that because, otherwise, they would lose a lot of money in that fiscal year. And it's the same story with all their games, and Ubi's doing the same practices!
Before I watch: it’ll be the same reason as movies, growth across the industry leads to inflated budgets at the top end, which necessitate ‘safe play’s and by the time the product gets to the consumers it’s soulless and feels like it’s made by committee (cos it literally is).
the way you keep up with QA/QC when dealing with very large programs and highly complex environments if you hire planners and codemasters... a codemaster doesn't need to be a gifted programmer he just needs to make sure people are working on THE RIGHT VERSION of the code. Otherwise you get bugs and faults re-released in patch after patch.
I just read an article where the author blamed the big flops recently on a several things. According to them the problem is 1. Studios are taking to long to develop games 2. Studios aren’t making their games inclusive enough to lgqtb and women 3. Studios aren’t doing enough climate change activism 4. Studios aren’t offering enough extra buyable content as soon as the game releases. 5. Studios aren’t focusing enough on online multiplayer games and are doing to much single player stuff. The list was 10 things long but I can’t remember the rest. It was all bullshit. But they were saying how they interviewed a bunch of people in the industry and this is allegedly what everyone believes is the problem. Studios are allegedly looking at Concords failure believing that is they only spent less time working on it and made it even more woke and had a bigger e-shop it would have done better.
News outlets do this all the time, with most trending issues. Explaining to us why such and such is that way, every single time leaving out the main cause. It’s deliberate obfuscation and deception.
They are right in one context. The modern audience didn't show up for Concord. It kind of makes sense that the takeaway would be to double down on everything. Granted they are completely misguided. They are trying to appeal to a group of people who don't play video games, but there is a huge untapped market there if you could just convince them to buy video games. The problem is, they literally think gaming is the worst possible hobby, and gamers are the worst kinds of people.
i will say one thing, theyre right about the first point if nothing else. games take WAY too long to make now. a game that will sell maybe a couple hundred thousand copies are having teams put behind them and worked on for 5 years costing the company more money than it could possibly make on release
We have bad writers for two main reasons. One, they have not lived life, the write life from the perspective of screen life, virtual life than actually living life in the real world. Second, we ha generation of writers that could get a professor or teacher cancelled for not applauding their (gulp) cut and paste/plagiarized/ cliche writing.
lol so many all time great games are games you would call "woke DEI" it's not the main reason, it's just the one reason you are stuck on because you want to bring politics into games just as much as the game companies do.
Who remembers the days where you’d gone into one of those ‘gaming’ shops, the equivalent of blockbuster for DVD’s and you’d buy the game, put the disc in and away you go. Always making sure you always save your progress on your PS1 insertable memory card 😂
11:40 it is my honest opinion that a majority of the time that player agency is removed in a lot of these situations is because the writers honestly believe that if you give the players the choice to make the "wrong decision" then you were encouraging players in those directions.
I remember the days you were excited when a big budget game came out and was worth your time to play, and now, the only reason i know whet games are being released is that they are so bad it’s almost like a “any publicity is good publicity” strategy
I had this glitch/bug in rise of the tomb raider. I was playing on hardest difficulty towards the end of the game and got to a checkpoint during some major action sequence. Decided to warp to different area to get one item I forgot. Got back to that checkpoint. Action-music blasting, but the game wouldn't let me progress the story anymore. It was on PS4. Tried to find a fix. No fix. Deleted the game.
Dying Light 2 for me. There's a point towards the end of the game where you need to fast travel back to the previous half of the world map, and the fast travel icons you need to select are just straight up missing. It's been like 2 years at this point and it's still just broken for me.
Tester: Hey man, you got a few bugs making the spaceships fly backwards. Devs at Bethesda: No it's NOT! We know it works properly! Tester: It's not working! Look at what it's doing right now! Devs: HR will say it does!! Tester: Dude... just fix the code, it's my job to make sure it's working properly and so far it's failing. HR: Stop harassing the Devs. Todd Howard: Ship it, fix it later. Devs: *eats a greasy pizza* Tester: I quit. This is my theory as to why Starfield is what it is. Ego and time pressure makes Quality Control quit their jobs before getting fired for letting bugs happen in the first place. Remember, it is always the tester that is the most responsible for allowing bad games to exist. Add that accountability with peer pressure and the Devs massive ego. All the good testers will just walk away from those jobs. It's a sad perspective.
No, HR isn't involved in the development in any way, but they hire "the right" people for positions of decision making. Regarding testers and bugs, I'm pretty sure 95% of unfixed bugs were found by QA and logged, but the decision in on management to prioritise them and decide when/if to fix them.
It's the tester trying to tell the devs about problems while the devs argue about how manly the female characters jawline should look like and how many types of oppression her backstory contains.
yes and no, i work at QA, im testing games and indeed HR has no word on process, yes there are stupid testers, yes kpi is killing quality and the client sees high bug report numbers as good outcome, there is a system to assign a priority to bugs/issues, sometimes devs dont know why is something not working, and finally as long as its playable and feels good is a go, so they allow small issues to go through which is kinda understandable but there is an important problem, the company, devs dont own timeframes, devs are being overworked and they are not precisely the enemy, there is someone above them screwing it up
A game that works at release is so rare these days it's an actual surprise when it happens. It's so rare that people give games a better review score just for that reason.
Let me explain this in simple terms. Money flows up and the shit flows down. When investors are shitting on executives, who are shitting on managers, who are shitting on developers who are shitting on customers you are not going to get good products.
The parallels between the games and television industry are insane. Massive once beloved IPs with limitless potential being milked, eroded and made for audiences that only exist on Twitter. Halo, LoTR, Star Wars are just a FEW examples - it's figuratively and literally so hard to watch.
So many things being destroyed. Lot of social engineering bs going on that ruining entertainment too as well as toxic ppl who want the things they hate changed when never belonged there in the first place
A problem is that games have gotten less complex, not more. They're advertised as more complex, and technically... sure, they're running on WAY stronger hardware that are truly limitless as far as being able to do anything you can imagine, and can have more complex physics and visuals and animation and more stuff happening at once... But the actual gameplay complexity has taken a nosedive for most major genres (as have the standards of devs, which is why 60fps minimum isn't a thing in all games on all platforms, which all current platforms are perfectly capable of). Games are more linear, have simpler combat, have less deep leveling/customization mechanics, feel shittier, are easier, have really large open worlds for no good gameplay reason (rarely is the point to have interesting, engaging exploration and finding secrets)... and so on. The very few truly great games that come out every year are the exceptions that prove the rules, and they're rarely as good as older, similar games. QA is only a small part of the issue, the bigger issue being that games are shittier regardless of how glitchy and broken they come out as. Cyberpunk (despite being good) could've come out with no glitches at all and would still have been less complex and interesting than the game that was promised (after a 100% faked reveal trailer with a ton of awesome shit that was not in the final game and is still not in the game). And the games are shittier because of corporate meddling and overall crappier employees (a lot of which make it their mission to fuck games up for various reasons... and some which have it as their job description to fuck games up). And it's been going on for a long-ass time, much longer than people seem to think (the industry has been in the process of crashing for well over 10 years, that's partly why monetization and game prices have gotten stupider every year, companies are desperate and coming to the wrong conclusions about why it's happening). Limitation breeds innovation.
13:0619:0620:00 @AsmonTV I am game developer with 20+ years experience, and I could tell you in detail why lots of bugs isn't a QA problem. TLDR: 1. Quantity prioritized over quality. 2. Vintage development practices in gamedev, underusing automatic testing (which should be part of implementing the feature, not after-the-fact testing). Also, bugs taking too long is part of how shaky their codebase is, and how hard it is to guarantee that the fix didn't break anything. The bugfix itself often takes like 10% or less of the time, the rest is manual testing, 90% of which should have been automated. p.s. I also worked in free-to-play a lot, and can say that you are 100% right about how microtransactions affect design of games. Ugly default skins so premium skins sell, make a problem to sell a solution, extra currencies with funny conversion ratios, gamba, all of that.
It's no coincidence that whenever I'm talking about political ideologies in games/movies/shows, it almost always starts with words like "ham-fisted", or "heavy handed" or "patronizing" or "slap-dashed". This wasn't done intentionally on my part, and it took years for me to realize THAT was what I was actually saying was the problem. It's not the ideology itself, it's the terrible ways in which these untalented "writers" incorporate them into said medium.
Well, the ideology itself is internally-inconsistent, highly theoretical, and impractical, so maybe it's all of those things AND a bad ideology to-boot.
@@rclaws3230 Oh, the ideology is bad. Worse, many of its tenets are so absurd that there's no way to use it as a literary device without it being ridiculous. So that's part of it, but then you also have "writers" who weren't hired because they were good at writing, but because they were activists.
The common reason stuff gets labeled woke is because it's bad and the ideology isn't helping the product's case, if they made it good, astronomically less people would complain about the ideology.
I'm going to disagree that Games have become more complex over time. Some are like what Rockstar puts out but, most of AAA games today only look complex on the surface. I would say the 6th and 7th generation of games had more going on under the hood mechanically than what we have today.
It's about all the crazy unlocks and shit now. Back in the day a game's was also the levels and beat the final boss. Now every game has like 30 grind mechanics that just add nothing to a quality story. A game like Banjo and Kazooie is lighters more simple in the design and mechanics then Something Harry potter. They are the same type of game but harry potter is sooooo much more complicated in unnecessary ways
Games are still more complex on a pound for pounds basis, but they're more focused on what matters and what sells in terms of mechanics. (DEI and demographics is a completely different discussion, im just talking mechanics here). Example: Compare GTA IV to GTA V. GTA IV is actually alot more complex in most ways and there are many videos on this. But GTA V solid infinitely more and remains more popular. Because GTA IV has more complexity but GTA V better game loops.
Couldn't agree more, AAA games are mechanically dumber and basic physics wise. Not to mention the cutscene simulator galore on Sony last 10 years with stale gameplay. Shooters regressed. Indies are the way
Modern games are just missing a few things. A few hundred million more dollars and a few more people in leadership positions with diverse backgrounds and hair colors and we'll have the perfect game.
I work in a whiskey label printing factory and the quality / kpi thing is so true, they introduced new targets for time to get the job done recently and the quality went down hill across the board....
I love making video games. But I'm afraid that if I want to play about a protagonist who is wheelchair bound (my best friend is wheelchair bound, my old teacher teaches wheelchair bound kids, my girlfriend dances with wheelchair bound kids), then even if I have it in my life, the community would label it as just ticking off a list of things I'm doing with them, when I'm not, I just want to show this world to others as an artist through video games. I had an idea for a game in a wheelchair before, but I rejected it because I was afraid of negative criticism...
I believe when you're putting in effort, sincere about it and not just checking boxes, it shows and the audience can feel it. I'm sure they will accept your work.
Well first off, you're an indi dev, so you're less likely to push an agenda because you have a much smaller audience. Then, if the game is good, people won't care. I'm sure most people have an 80-20 ratio between gameplay and world lore. Meaning that anything that is not linked to the gameplay is only the icing anyway. Just don't make a good icing to cover a dump 😅
I didn’t understand Hogwarts Legacy, how can it be so diverse long before the movies? What happened between the game and the movies, a purge of non-ethnic Brits? They must have all been banished on a mass scale. That’s at best, and at worst it’s very dark and I don’t know what they were thinking
3:24 This is a big misunderstanding that took me a while to figure out for myself. The original patents were filed YEARS before, the most recent filing in like May of this year were EXTENDING the original part. It seems that Nintendo periodically does this where they refile updated versions of their patents. So while the latest filing did come out after palworld, the original patent approval came much earlier than Palworld.
I don't think it's a misunderstanding. The choice of exactly what they chose to fragment seem terribly on the nose for what palworld does. Even if they do these kinds of things occasionally, this one seems targeted considering the timing. And despite everyone stating nintendo "needs" to protect its ip or patents, no there is no actual need. I could probably look around and find many other things that the patent applies to, but nintendo chose to specifically fight palworld and not anyone else.
@@talkingtakotaco8611 I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by "misunderstanding" in my original post. I'm not saying that Nintendo "just happened" to refile their patents around the same time that they are suing Palworld. Yes, they are pursuing Palworld because they think they can get a lot of money out of them - I'm not claiming otherwise. Rather, I'm saying that the patents pre-date Palworld's release and it's false to claim they only filed a patent after Palworld was created. The relevant patent for catching monsters in a 3D environment goes back at least as far as 2021 with patent JP7545191B1. In contrast, Palworld was released in January 2024 - three years after that patent was filed
Launching a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) became a popular strategy for start-up software firms in the early 2000s. To avoid early investors to get burned if no one bought the product (no market validation/market product fit yet) and allow developers time to "rapidly" improve the product based off of user feedback. IN NO WAY SHAPE OR FORM SHOULD ESTABLISHED COMPANIES WITH ESTABLISHED IPS/BRANDs ALLOW THIS THINKING TO TOUCH GAMES LIKE HALO and other popular and proven games/studios. This is what is currently happening in the gaming industry and it's unbelievable!
You hit the nail on the head. They’re making “cinematic experiences” because they’re wannabe directors that couldn’t get a job in Hollywood, so they end up directing a game instead. Almost all the budget goes into their cutscenes, then the gameplay is trash made to hold together the director’s narrative and graphic artist’s unwanted self-inserts.
Before watching the video I'm gonna give my gut feeling on this. There's 2 problems: 1. Execs that look at high sales figure games, don't understand why they worked, and insist on copying surface level qualities and trend chasing. 2. Devs who push agendas too hard, instead of crafting a satisfying experience. In some extreme cases they actively hate their own audience. In both cases, the mistake is not understanding who your audience is and what they want.
19:55 I do not agree with the sentence "I think QA is absolutely the problem". Yes, there are bad actors in QA. Like in any job. BUT as a Team Leader of a QA team, working with pretty big companies around the world I just want to point out 1 thing. Not every bug, that QA finds gets fixed. Hell, sometimes not even 60% of them. And I personally, reported many CRITICAL bugs which were completely destroying the integrity of the game MANY months BEFORE the game release, which just got ignored until 2-3 months after release. It doesn't matter how good QA is as long as Devs do not fix the bugs! The issue with the quality of games is not only on QA but also with greedy companies that are not willing to fix issues due to "it will take too much time and too little damage to the game for it to be worth fixing now". I also can't even count how many bugs, that were reported by me and my team ended up being features due to laziness and greediness of companies.
Indie South African dev here and thank you so much for bumping this ZA content creator up! The South African scene needs more voices that can pierce the global sphere we have such an awesome scene over here! Thanks Asmon and thanks to the amazing community for boosting this!
They can’t write good stories because they never went through real hardship. You are slowly seeing this in even in manga how new writers just want to do their own version of popular stories.
Slowly? the industry has been like that for some time now. For example, manga writers have latched onto Isekai years ago and hunderds of slop has formed as a result. You have to really dig through garbage to find the good ones.
Speaking of manga, this is how I feel about demon slayer. Sorry if it’s an unpopular opinion. I still watch the show and enjoy the anime’s quality but it still feels like a watered down mix of Bleach and Naruto.
To be fair, manga and anime started going downhill in quality the moment it became popular in America, bcos after that happened the Japanese authors started writing in a way that would cater to American audiences as well. Manga/anime today is not close to being as deep as it was 10+ years ago.
I don't think that games are released incomplete because developers are lazy. I think it's because executives insist on releasing the game, even though it's not done in order to match road maps they have laid out for investors.
Holding to a schedule is not the problem. We just can't tell from the outside whether the execs hired 50 people when it would take 100 to make that schedule, then pushed out the game unfinished, or whether there were 120 people who were just lazy and only got the job half done. Either could be true, or both, and no one internally is going to be able to speak honestly about it until years later. Either way once the funding is spent, the game has to ship. The real evil is when the whole affair is orchestrated from the beginning. When there was never a realistic plan to make the date with all promised features, because the actual plan all along was to exploit gamers. When the plan was to sell an EA game as a 1.0 release, then used day 1 sales to finish the game. I think that's what's been on the rise for the past decade.
Maybe, but there are several other reasons for releasing an unfinished game. 1- They may not want to invest more money in a game’s development, unless it proves to be successful, so they release it first. 2- They might need to release a game on a specific date, in order to meet holiday demand, or to avoid releasing alongside another game that will steal buyers. 3- If there was a campaign hyping up the game’s release, they want to release the game before the hype dies down. There is more ofc.
In case why people are confused with the "secondary currency" talk. Look up Japan's pachinko parlors and how those work. I swear, these corpos found inspiration to take the CONCEPTS of how pachinko parlors work.
10000% if anyone thinks asia will save gaming.. buddy, where do you think the gambling mechanics came from? Why do you think mobile gaming is huge in asia? And all = $$$$$ gacha gambling mechanics. It’s delibearlty making you addicted.. same with anime etc.. idol culture.. asia.. has a gambling problem.. and why so many stories have to do with gambling and the consequences of it.. because the creator lost family over it.. got screwed over by their parents from gambling, etc.. its a problme.. even in the smaller sense.. ufo catchers are gambling as well. Gotta get good.. gonna get the toy.. but to get that next chance.. gotta pay up.
You're mixing things up. The pachinko currency is used because gambling for money is prohibited, so they add an extra step. In the case of games, they use secondary currencies to disassociate the price of things from the real money value and make them look more acceptable. The concepts are different.
Example of game dev incompetence. In Starfield there's a guy named Dennys on Mars who sends you out for 5 helmets or 6 guns or whatnot. If you have two of that name of gun in your inventory marked with hotkeys IT WILL TAKE ONE OF YOURS EVEN IF YOU HAVE MANY MORE THAN REQUESTED and I reported that bug before release last year. Its still there... it isn't even a bug, its an incompetence.
A perfect example of recent half-cooked AAA software is the last WoW patch where many many guild banks were wiped and Blizzard could not or would not recover the items. If they no longer properly analyse a change and fail to test that change before release. If they no longer do backups - or if they do but don't test the restoration process then what's safe anymore? Nothing it would seem because they can get away with it.
Padda, articulate his points very well, his video editing is actually not bad. And it’s a breath of fresh air hearing someone with similar complaints, and issues with video games nowadays. If he keeps cranking out videos like this he deserves a follow.
Summary of the video (Powered by NEX, an AI tool which summarizes UA-cam videos) Key Points： 1. [Key Point 1]: Indie studios innovate, AAA publishers often disappoint. 2. [Key Point 2]: Corporate greed in gaming industry stifles creativity, innovation. 3. [Key Point 3]: Legislation needed to curb exploitative game monetization practices. Important Details: Here's the timeline 00:00:00 Introduction and Overview • Speaker thanks viewers for support and views. • Discusses the gaming industry's current state and Indie studios' innovation. 00:01:57 Corporate Greed in Gaming • Speaker criticizes Nintendo's legal actions against Indie developers. • Highlights the issue of corporate greed stifling creativity. 00:05:02 Politics in Games • Discusses the integration of politics in games. • Critiques tokenistic representation and patronizing storytelling. 00:12:24 Quality Assurance and Game Releases • Speaker discusses the trend of unfinished game releases. • Critiques the reliance on post-launch patches. 00:26:07 Microtransactions and Consumer Exploitation • Speaker critiques the use of microtransactions in AAA games. • Suggests legislation as a solution to exploitative practices. 00:36:25 Conclusion and Call to Action • Speaker praises Indie studios and AAA companies that listen to fans. • Emphasizes the need for legislation to address industry issues.
3:15 that is NOT what happened. they filed divisional patents which take already established patents and subdivided them into more consolidated patents. This is a scummy tactic to make patent lawsuits much harder because instead of just dealing with the 1 patent they have to deal with 4 individual patents. The original patent was filed in 2021 for pokemon archeus and the effective date on the patents that it was divided into are based on that date so they are enforceable from 2021 onwards even though they were created in 2021.
as a developer i disagree with your take on the bugs. there's a big difference between something that should have been caught with regression testing, which i would refer to as a bug to be simple, and what most games have nowadays which is features that were never in a working state and a conscious decision was made to just release it anyways. when they finally "patch" them they're not fixing bugs, they're just finishing working on it. maybe it's just me but it's really obvious when something is an intermittent maybe hardware-specific bug which is easy to tell by whether or not it affects all players. when things are broken for everyone, especially those that are easily reproducible with basic gameplay, that's just laziness. the other problem with releasing unfinished intentionally broken games that most people don't seem to care about but i do is they're intentionally wasting your time. you paid for a product when it was supposed to be ready and after taking your money they've just bought themselves more time to finish development. we used to have midnight releases and we'd go and pick up games at midnight. if people were still doing that only to find out that the game isn't done yet and you're going to have to wait some amount of time for them to hopefully fix it they would never get away with it again let alone every single release. just because it's a digital download doesn't take away from the fact that everyone's time is valuable and i'd rather waste money than my time. i also don't think this is the actual developers doing these things. i've never worked with a developer that wanted to release something that wasn't ready unless they were being forced to do so and it sucks. the problem is with the management that make decisions for profit at the cost of their reputation, customer trust, reviews, etc. making profit is important, but you can only exploit your customer base's trust so many times so to me i never understood the tradeoff especially for AAA studios that make their own timelines and have control over every aspect of a game. tl;dr: unfinished features != bug
Til you read the day1 notes from the devs and there's entire sections dedicated to "known bugs". Sometimes it's not even just a completions of unfinished content agenda in a text or forum style, it's a video release. Crunch sucks, but, to release anyway is a death-sentence. Should be illegal to release unfinished content if you advertised the product as such, but, yes, unfinished != bug
On the subject of Minimum Viable Product, I think the purpose of that term get's misunderstood by folks who aren't developers. MVP is hugely important because that is the point where you step back and assess the direction of the project. You need to be sure that everything is thoroughly tested and that you are delivering the desired experience even at that level. The reason for this is if you have a flawed concept, or if there are bugs in the core functions of your product, then you want to identify that early, so that your foundation is solid before you add additional complexity. TLDR: It is not best practice to release any product at the MVP level of development (excepting perhaps early access). It's simply a hugely important milestone in the development process. Companies that are doing so are likely under no illusions that they are releasing a finished product.
I can attest that competent QA teams do uncover a whole lots of the issues; they just don't get fixed in time for many reasons (priority, time, or immensely hard to repro and fix properly). Most games are basically miracles that managed to ship. It's like a Jenga tower held together by hope and prayers. Within a day, there might be 200 changes done to the game, statistically speaking there's always a chance any of them can improve and/or make stuff worse. Basically the only remparts against between a stable game launch and a bad one is effective management processes (which include QA), skill/experience of the team and time. When QA is bad, it's often because the project management is even worse...
Cyberpunk did representation correctly...You have trans characters but the game doesnt need to scream it at you. They act like normal people doing normal things just how most would in real life.
I just don't get why a person's genital composition and sexual preference is necessary. Think of how many characters in literature that don't focus on those qualities that are amazing characters.
@@chrislevack405 its how these grown children rate their value in the world, whoever has the most labels, whoever has the most victim points. Then they have to scream it at you to make sure you. If you live your life like that, you are going to inject it into whatever media you create because its all you know.
Oh but it is in your face if you pay attention to the writing. And the stickers on the car. It's pathetic how many people glaze Cdpr for their dog game just cause they fixed some bugs and gave away some free cosmetics.
Imagine you pre-order a new type of car, but when you move the wheel to the right, the car goes to the left and the brakes are leaking fluid. Imagine you pre-order a new type of refrigerator, but it sometimes heats up its contents instead of cooling it and sometimes it connects wrongly to the power grid, causing sparks in the plug. Video games seem to be one of the few industries where selling incomplete products before they're even made isn't immediately destroyed by the law.
Do you know the bugtesting term "showstopper" ? Ill explain. Its a bug that completly stops the player from advancing More and more games are releasing with showstoppers and that didnt used to be the case Showstoppers were the priorty for bug testers but nowadays developers dont care anymore
22:21 Let's be real: C - was the OLD minimum viable product. Nowadays, it's D- or even F+ in some cases. "Oh yeah the game is fundamentally broken and unplayable right now guys, but trust us - we have a roadmap. Just one more month and the game will be barely functional."
Buggy games on launch is usually down to pressure from shareholders and publishers, trying to force devs to release games faster than they can. It kills the passion because developers aren't given enough time to make something that is good and complete, while still ticking all of the boxes needed to compete in the industry.
I would argue that triple AAA games are bad because of the customers nowadays. The majority of gamers are well aware how these studios will put out buggy and broken products and yet will proceed to pay $70 at launch and buy the game knowing full well what's about to happen. Just because companies like CD Project Red and Hello Games managed to fix their games doesn't excuse the fact that they screwed up big time at launch. The only thing worse than a clown is the fool that falls for their tricks despite knowing what a clown is known to do, and ESPECIALLY when that trick comes with a $70 price tag. I don't mean to tell people how they should spend their hard earned money. But part of the reason why these gaming giants keep getting away by pushing out unfinished games is because of the customers themselves. Stop providing the train it's fuel and eventually it will come to a halt. Don't pre-order games and wait until about a month or so to see if it is actually worth buying.
Something that confuses me is why most developers don't just first grab assets and mechanics of what works well in the last game move it over, change details, and update it to new games theme and mechanics then work on the new stuff that you don't have yet. Save time, money, and people. Fromsoft and their souls/born/elden games have been doing this and its been working well. even when working on a new type of game they haven't tried much before.
Still? It's guaranteed until proven otherwise. Wait at least a year so the game is fixed and buy it on sale. In meantime enjoy indie games and thousands of mods. I honestly have no idea why people still care about "triple A"
Indie is even worse.... there are 100s of indie games every year and only 1% are even close to decent. This video makes it sound like top hit indie games like BM Wukong is the standard.
Considering thier quality control Nintendo really have fucked up with pokemon. If it got half the love zelda has pal world probably wouldn't have even happened
Pokemon games are developed by gamefreak, not nintendo. Nintendo has some % shares of game freak, and licencing rights and some other stuff, but the creative (or in case of pokemon uncreative) freedom is with gamefreak. And gamefreak does the minimal amount of work to sell 20mio copies every other year. They lucked on the IP, and are milking it. I dont think gamefreak has ever done any other quality game. And pokemon games being worse than the Initial versions 25years ago, is such a sad thing.
adding 'gem' type currency is a sly way to try and keep the immersion of a game, when in reality it is immersion breaking when you use real money to buy it
I'd agree if this wasn't a part of the stream. These videos are made from him streaming, it's not him just making this video to talk about this one thing. Plus, this is stuff that needs to be constantly reiterated, they're huge problems in gaming that he and the video are talking about
The funniest thing is that now gaming companies like EA, Ubisoft have realized all their big old IPs were and ARE the peak of the creative output and quality, where their creators loves their projects instead of looking for a bag. So now are just rehashing old classics with new "Graphics" that are usually more broken and garbage than the actual original release of the game! The magic of hiring only "Brace face" as your entire creative force. The companies that used to push absolute bangers, now are acting like a desperate gold digger trying to paint their dead dementia riddened husbands porchse that's been rotting for the past 12 years with just a different coat of paint trying to sell it for its original value or dare I say make a profit THANK GOD they are getting bankrupt they just have to get used to not having jobs OR money. Also they somehow broke the transmission painting just sucks but they are getting what they deserve.
They are bad writers who also lack the education and experience to know that they are bad writers. I at least know I'm a bad writer for stories and fantasy. Give me something technical and I'll make your eyeballs hear smells... If you know you're bad at something you can plan out ahead the steps, guides and mechanical approach to do it competently. These writers now don't even have the technical skill to plan writing or even follow basic character developmental techniques that have been in print for over 100 years - they don't even think to look at such guides.
I agree with most things Asmon says. But one thing I don't is when he said if a game is good and has DEI or woke, it will still sell well. It won't. Gamers don't like this sht full top. He argued that point with Cyberpunk or BG3. But they weren't advertised as such and only has woke if you chose to with choices in game. That being said, games that have body type 1 and 2 are a joke. Revert them back to male and female. If men and women are so alike, why are body type 2 covered? Hypocrits 🤦♂️
I think it’s true tho. But dei and woke is virtue signalling vs a studio that really believes this stuff.. it’s not really woke.. if you actually practice and believe it.. and there has been good games with this stuff.. it is what it is. Peopel need to toe with their wallets..
It depends on how much the woke was allowed to fester. Take BG3 for example, you have bullshit like pronouns and some stuff, but you ALSO have super-sexy characters, waifus, stuff that appeals to normal people. BG3 did it right by having BOTH sides, unlike shit like Concord who went 100% one side and ignore the other.
@@npcimknot958 you got it backwards. Dei and woke is not just virtue signalling but the vast majority of people don't stand behind the ideology and only go through the notion to not get cancelled. People who are convinced of the ideology and push it with actual conviction are absolutely woke. Even more so than the people who just pay lip service.
Hopefully Ubisoft's self-inflicted downfall will positively influence future games to prioritize optimization, quality and gameplay over "diverse" and "inclusive" incentives.
31:25 Consumer protection agencies across the EU filed an official complaint just last week, petitioning for secondary currencies purchasable with real money to become illegal. It might happen, it might not, but it is on the radar of some pretty heavy players. Their 56 page report is called "Getting played: the true cost of virtual currency", and it's worth a read.
I like this guy's videos well enough, but I felt like I had deja vu for most of the video; mostly saying the same shit everyone else has been saying, just condensed into two videos with clean editing. All the same, I appreciate Asmongold for supporting smaller channels.
The situation is like: Fine>starting to be sick>illness>extreme illness>starting to recover>fine again I think “gaming” is in extreme illness situation right now, soon we will find out.
I hate regulations from the government. It's often turned into a industry with billions of your dollars disappearing. But I'm against gambling for children.
Dude who cares? Children arent gambling. They dont have the money. Very rarely do parents enable it, and honestly, its their problem. I don't care at all if it ruins their lives. It doesnt effect me.
@@An.Unsought.Thought What were you wanting to portray with your comment? You don't care but felt the need to share your opinion. Kids buy loot boxes and similar items. It's plainly conditiong for gambling.
early access models can work great. some of my favorite games have used it (hades, valheim, enshrouded). the issue isnt releasing unfinished games. its the lying about. If AAA studio were honest and just openly embraced an early access model I think this would be way less of an issue. Some people love getting to see the game develop and the people that dont are informed and can wait for 1.0. the truth is most AAA is an early access release and they are just not advertising it that way like the indie studios that use the early access model are. When you openly say thats what youre doing people tend to be less mad and better informed. Its when you are using an early access model and not disclosing it that is the problem and that is what is happening in AAA. why are AAA studio allowed to not disclose it? Indie studios using an early access model have a big disclaimer flagged on the steam store page making sure you know thats what they are doing and that is what you are buying. If AAA did the same, I bet there'd be less animosity about it. Super fans would still buy and feel okay about it because they were informed and would enjoy getting to see the game develop over time.
Asmon is wrong about the secondary currencies. They're not there ONLY to confuse the customer. They are also a way for the developer to have time-limited sales for the packages of the currency, where you can obtain the same amount for less cash, and then even long after the sale has expired, your currency has the same value as it would have if you had bought it at full price. So I think secondary currencies are fine, as long as the developers can justify it with a reasonable schedule of sales for the currency packs.
You could do that without secondary currencies. Simply make an offer "Charge your account with $50 and we'll add $25 for free!" Or keep it simple making the conversion rate 1:1 with you secondary currencies
If they aren’t there to obscure costs. Then why is it always odd numbers? Example: 40 dollar pack for 1200 points, dlc costs 1000 now you have 200 points leftover and it makes you want to spend more money to use the leftover points. Why not just directly say the price value on the skins themselves? Why don’t all games have direct conversions, 10 dollars for 100 points 20 for 200 points etc etc
Also, these secondary currencies have no value outside of the game. So if you have 20 dollars worth of points leftover there’s no way you can refund it or get your money back and it’s stuck on your account forever.
@@kyvian251 Spending 20 dollars to have 20 dollars in an account you can't refund is not a single bit different than spending 20 dollars for gems/doohickeys that you can't refund in your account.
We need some chinese company to buy Ubisoft and make it great again
@@devonnick6908 I would prefer Korean
Chinese? lol. These "people" can't create anything
Tencent will buy Ubi
Making American gaming created greatness again via china. 😂😂😂😂. I'm here for that.
I think it would be awesome if Ubisoft learned from their mistakes and actually put out good games. But one can only dream.
Videogames used to be made by computer nerds who loved D&D and Star Trek and LOTR. Now they are made by drama club kids and people who went for art school for fashion design and watch Bridgerton.
God is that show awful.
They used to watch Star Wars and LOTR and play video games when they got off from developing video games now game devs watch the Big Bang theory and have a wall of funko pops
Like Asmon said in similar discussion; not just usual drama kids, but "loser" drama kids who want revenge to society (their words not mine).
As we see, they made it with hate and rage, not -passion- love nor fun
@@emne5750Tell me about it. My wife watches that show on the 1 TV we have. Thank God for the Steam Deck
I don't even know what Bridgerton is, thank God
Anyone ever notice how they gaslight us by saying "technology" issue as to why women in western games aren't scanned right. But for some reason eastern games don't have that problem? Weird
Meanwhile their favorite "Beauty" Debra Wilson always gets a perfect 1:1 conversion... make it make sense
because evil hates beauty, its really quite simple.
Well it's obvious, the East has secret alien technology they're using to make games not suck.
@KurgerBing-p5i spot on! Evil cannot create, it can only destroy.
Well to give them credit, china has been scanning peoples faces a lot in the last 5-10 years lol
9:40 Remember that woman who tried to frame her father to be a deadbeat dad only to be proven wrong and be exposed as a rich spoiled brat. She's a writer 😂
Wait which writer is that? Who is this lady?
Your talking about the breakdancing dad drama 😂
@@SirBladewind the break dancing dad and his brat daughter
@@cecollins68 yeah lmao
Damn she is bad even at that.
12:50 Don't forget the fact that back in the day it wasn't all that easy to push out updates. Companies had to make stable games because they knew the players wouldn't always be able to get the updates.
It’s just no excuse anymore, black myth wukong came out smooth as butter, stellar blade was great and so as warhammer. These companies CAN make a fixed game but they just wanna meet the release date, imagine someone sells you a busted lawnmower for double the price for more cheaper and efficient lawnmowers and says they’ll fix it over time
Speaking as a QA manager, I can say this: Complexity of testing scales exponentially with software complexity, while coding complexity actually scales linearly. The problem is that a lot of QAs(in my experience) coming up with the 'What to test' thinks like a developer, so they miss A LOT of things. Simple example using PoE: In coding, we will probably develop the passive skills, the active gems, and the support gems separately and the code is isolated, and the effort is 3n. However, in testing, we should consider the combination effects of all 3, so the test scenarios should be n^3.
Someone called me a Nazi yesterday for arguing AGAINST censorship, you can't make this shlt up. Of course it was one of those woke clowns so.
Peopel just dont know definitions anymore.. everything comes around dont worry about it
Don't argue with the cannon fodder, they're just noise.
The nicer version I get called on the daily is right wing. On the daily. Said friend has a BA in English.
Also has TDS.
But I've met all sorts of people.
"Of course we’ll have fascism. We’ll have it under the guise of anti-fascism."
One of my Facebook posts got flagged for "False information" when all it showed was:
Kamala Harris: "Unburdened by what has been."
Marx: "Unburdened by what has been."
I think a major reason for such poor implementation of politics is that the writers don't actually UNDERSTAND their own beliefs. So much "agenda" is what I refer to as "Find-and-Replace Analogy":
I want to talk about immigration.
Find: "Mexicans", Replace: "Twi'leks".
Find "America", Replace "Empire".
Message: "Look how evil the Empire is for rejecting all these Twi'lek refugees!"
An honest, thoughtful analysis begins with the understanding that the hot-button issue is just an extension of a core belief. Immigration, for example, is an extension of "Duty of Care": Who is how responsible for providing what, to whom? This is a genuine debate about balancing the needs of your family versus the needs of your neighbor's family, and how much you can - or should - sacrifice to help others, even if your own family suffers as a result. There are SO many metaphors you can work with at that level, and so many different positions you can take if circumstances change! It makes you THINK, which is what this kind of messaging is SUPPOSED to do.
I am hoping for a chapter 2 to this. Keep cooking dude.
Are you a writer? Someone should hire you lol
@rumham8124 I wish lol.
"What are your qualifications?"
"I've made a mediocre DnD setting, I've played Dragon Age: Origins, and I think The Rings of Power sucks."
"Are you willing to relocate to Southern California?"
"Not a snowball's chance in hell."
"When can you start?"
@fvb7 I'm thinking of titling it "Political Propaganda in Expositional Dialogue in Media and the Problem of Subtext (Or the Lack Thereof)". What do you think? Too punchy?
Find "Illegal immigrants", Replace "Refugees".
Because the audience they’re made for doesn’t buy video games.
SO true. Even their attempts to get people from other "identities" or whatever is a total failure. I'm a woman and usually end up insulted by these "overcome your ovaries" storylines that they keep dishing out. Just give us game play and immersion!! It shouldn't be that hard.
They don’t exist. They’re all bots.
Nah they absolutely do. The only thing is that they make up maybe 3% at MOST. And of that 3%, most only play cozy games.
@spawn302 Oh I absolutely agree, but like you were saying they mostly populate cozy games (indie titles) rather than triple A games.
Yeah, that's a side effect of marketing to people who don't like capitalism 😂😂😂
Dev here,
Going to give my two cents.
Yes you can say devs are lazy, I agree to an extent but I would also say we are lazy by nature. Asmon is also right to an extent.
However, working for a corporate company is simply far too fragmented and I always go back to the video by one of the founders of Fall Out, as it’s true, devs are capped at the pace they can move primarily due to corporate product driven frameworks like scrum. This means a small change instead of for a small studio where QA speaks to dev, dev fixes, it turns into, qa raises a ticket, ticket has to go through PO, PO has to refine ticket, ticket gets stuck in backlog, another dev then eventually get to the ticket with an over inflated time estimate, it then takes 5x as long to fix.
It’s just a slow and painful process cause by business scrum frameworks that are product driven instead of a healthy balance that you get in small companies where people have more of a voice.
The reason this "relying on the customer being stupid" thing is working less and less with time is because players are becoming disillusioned with the companies they once blindly trusted.
Its all about the pattern recognition. One bad game is whatever, two in a row is disappoining, but whatever, three in a row is suspicious, four in a row solidifies the pattern, and is seen as a fundamental flaw with the way the companies are making the games. They've relied on this tactic for too long, and its run its course, as all things do. Its caught up to them
There are tons of games with politics, racism, slavery, religion , and so on. It was never a problem. How many rpgs have a race that people dislike? For whatever reason. Or a race of slaves. Almost all of them. No one cared. They were well done, and most were very thought-provoking. Making you consider the morality and choices you were making. Now they have decided we are too dumb to understand these things or are too dumb to handle the nuance. So they have to smack us in the face with it. We should be in a golden age of the most intelligent and creative writers. Yet somehow it is worse than even 10 years ago. I can deal with bugs, glitches, and even graphics not being great. I can't deal with terrible writing, handholding, and forcing your views on me. I'm happy to play a game covering heavy topics as mentioned. As long as it's involved in the story and intelligently done.
Propaganda used to be a bit more cleverly implemented. I like reading sci-fi novels from the 60s, 70s and 80s and finding the social engineering of the time. It's mainly feminism, sexual liberation, anti-nuclear, anti-communist and pro-environmental messages.
Wait until the woke censors learn that slavery still exists in 2024 in many, many nations around the world. And, shock horror, their political crusade has done… (checks notes)… nothing to end slavery.
Exactly. Dei isn’t the problem, it’s when it’s forced, I don’t like force situations, I don’t want a gay character just because he’s gay or stereotypical gay.Ff16 did well with Dion, a gay character, you only know because he’s in love with one of his soldiers but his sexuality isn’t his motives to fight.
When will people realize that there is a huge difference between political themes and an actually agenda being pushed into a game by trillionares.
This shit doesn't affect only a couple of games, it does affect most companies in the west and probably the conpany you work for too.
ESG (which every company chases) - pushes DEI in every shape or way possible to get as much funding as possible.
Games are bad now because of greed which resulted in the DEI. They hirrd based on DEI without a single thought and replaced / forced out all their talent which made the amazing games of the past.
Now you have all this studios filled with DEI hires and activists and are suprised that they only produce crap.
Master Samwise (great channel btw) did a video very recently talking about the nuances of politics in storytelling and I'd highly recommend it.
I agree when people say it IS impossible to keep politics out of storytelling, but there are ways to authentically present an idea 'within' a narrative. To some, an idea will 'always' be seen as political, depending on your worldview. It behooves a good writer, not to use a narrative as an excuse to bludgeon you with the idea. To have the story be the voice conveying that idea, not to have the voice of the writer lecturing you.
A very recent example, off the top of my head. Consider the difference between Andor and The Acolyte. You could be forgiven for forgetting they came out of the same studio.
As someone who worked in Games QA, I want to answer the question Asmon asked @20:19. While working on Alien: Isolation, the entire QA team for that game was pulled into an office and screamed at by the QA managers for not inputting enough bugs each week towards the end of the testing period, before the game was going to platforms for certification to be on their systems. Keep in mind at this time, the Alien team had the largest portion of QA testers working on the game, while the other projects continued to do their work simultaneously.
So absolutely this happens in games, but I do want to add an additional comment that while it seems to be on the lowest level of QA testers that are the problem, the real problem stems from the top down. Production puts the pressure on the Devs, which puts the pressure on to the QA teams. It all rolls downhill. It's especially soul crushing as a QA, when you see the game you've worked on is still riddled with issues, including ones that you know were inputted into the bug database, and were never addressed due to the lack of time that the upper management has forced onto both the Dev and QA teams.
The upper management and Production teams are filled with the types of people that expect 9 women can give birth to a baby in 1 month, when we all know that it's going to take 9 months regardless of how many people are trying.
So basically Investors > Upper Management > Devs > QA > Customers. Unrealistic deadlines most likely the main issue and in turn the tail which are the customers get fked.
@@MrRaynx3 Pretty much yeah. Also a lot of QA testers are customers themselves. Truly they want what the general public want but often can’t even express their concerns with the project without it being dismissed. Hell even things like in game stores are the very last thing that the testers will have to make sure works, mostly because it’s the very last thing that gets added into a game. It’s always as disappointing to us as it is to customers to see higher ups push these decisions that we know will be disliked by everyone.
So its like everything else, too big to fail and too big to operate properly. So now we're stuck with another industry that won't be allowed to die and we have to create gaming welfare.
had a boss that embodies that 9 babies in a month mindset -_-
Yeah, they set impossible deadlines, fry devs, and sell unfinished products to customers.
There's a trans character in Hogwarts Legacy? And people boycotted it because it was transphobic? Make it make sense.
Further proves that you can’t make the sect of people happy no matter what
I think the author behind the original books was/is considered to be transphobic.
The developers attempted to adjust for this when making their game to distance from the author.
Orson Scott Key made Enders game, but he's quite homophobic. Still an awesome story worth telling and worth sharing, but some people choose to consider include an entire person's character for the art they make.
Schrödinger's Representation: It's acknowledged only when it's in the buyer's face and only when it doesn't go against other narratives to do so.
@@White__Inkstrange because I never heard her say anything that was either hateful or factually incorrect about trans people.
So trans activists were boycotting Hogwarts because of JK Rowling's stance on trans people. The studio thought the backlash was enough to warrant them to add a trans character last minute to try to please those people, but it didn't work.
From an active game dev in AAA environment perspective, games are full of bugs, not because of game dev laziness, but because of overscoping. Upper management are so greedy of packing games full of things and cutting cost its simply insane and unrealistic. That leads to bugs. Oh and thats not even at mid leadership /production level. This is all the way up, the product owners essentially.
Scope creep too.
More governments need start making steps that The Netherlands and even Australia have made.
Context: Netherlands is well on their way to outright banning loot boxes in games bought in their country. (I don't know if this well end with requiring devs to be able to turn off the feature or outright banning the entire game.)
Australia has changed their video game classification to require games with loot boxes be Rated-M.
You can not buy them in the Netherlands some games are blocked, some do not give the option and some ask if you are Dutch and if you say no you can buy them
These woke game developers make games for an audience that doesn't exist.
And they wonder why no one is buying.
Ya, they think they're infallible, every good person believes what they do, so it's not messaging in their eyes, it's just right.
DEI is easy and valuable investor money. Thats why publishers go down this route. It's often not even about the ideology... it's about to attracting investors that are willing to invest money to push these agendas using this media... and there are a lot of them... the trade-off for the devs is having to comply and to hire diverstiy instead of competence...
They don't make games for them. They are just chasing the ESG money which they have for a while now and they will do anything for more.
That's the reason they hire consultant firms like SBI on top so that they achieve the next quota to gain even more funding.
They are helping in creating the modern audience.
@Potato_Sprout If we follow that Poll on NeoGaf.
It's 5%.... lol
A lot of people miss the point of the "Modern Audience". They're not catering to the miniscule audience that exist now, they're trying to create the "Modern Audience" in the next generation.
DEI
D - Destruction
E - Exclusion
I - Insanity
I'd change the Destruction to Division, but that's just a personal preference. Definitely has been destroying companies.
that works for sure. my dad and i call it the Didn't Earn It badge, lmao.
E for Entropy
Destroy it from the Inside to rebuild it in their image
Division, Exclusion and Indoctrination
Hello -- QA guy here. The problem with QA isn't the scaled up complexity. QA is done either in house by generally understaffed departments or outsourced (generally with disastrous results). QA is done on an extremely strict schedule, with proper iteration time and resolution time not part of the equation. QA now is supposed to find only the most egregious issues and get those into a resolution pipeline, but oftentimes what QA finds are bugs that are considered 'shippable'. To be fair, these often aren't the biggest deal, but sometimes they can be indicative of bigger problems that would've benefited from investigation.
In short, the reason big AAA games don't have stable releases is because it's simply not a priority compared to the schedule and the cost, which has scaled up, but nowhere near to a reasonable degree.
What is there one of in every monkey but two of in every howler monkey?
Dev here,
Going to give my two cents.
Yes you can say devs are lazy, I agree to an extent but I would also say we are lazy by nature. Asmon is also right to an extent.
However, working for a corporate company is simply far too fragmented and I always go back to the video by one of the founders of Fall Out, as it’s true, devs are capped at the pace they can move primarily due to corporate product driven frameworks like scrum. This means a small change instead of for a small studio where QA speaks to dev, dev fixes, it turns into, qa raises a ticket, ticket has to go through PO, PO has to refine ticket, ticket gets stuck in backlog, another dev then eventually get to the ticket with an over inflated time estimate, it then takes 5x as long to fix.
It’s just a slow and painful process cause by business scrum frameworks that are product driven instead of a healthy balance that you get in small companies where people have more of a voice.
@@robertbarclay1709 Agile frameworks are a blight on society and there's no metrics that anyone can point to to convince me otherwise.
Man, I've been a QA at EA and the main issue there is the bug prioritisation. The game producers knew about the number of bugs that any game had at launch, but still decided to ship the game like that because, otherwise, they would lose a lot of money in that fiscal year. And it's the same story with all their games, and Ubi's doing the same practices!
the time to finish a feature is becoming insane I blame the strict schedule
Before I watch: it’ll be the same reason as movies, growth across the industry leads to inflated budgets at the top end, which necessitate ‘safe play’s and by the time the product gets to the consumers it’s soulless and feels like it’s made by committee (cos it literally is).
the way you keep up with QA/QC when dealing with very large programs and highly complex environments if you hire planners and codemasters... a codemaster doesn't need to be a gifted programmer he just needs to make sure people are working on THE RIGHT VERSION of the code. Otherwise you get bugs and faults re-released in patch after patch.
I just read an article where the author blamed the big flops recently on a several things. According to them the problem is
1. Studios are taking to long to develop games
2. Studios aren’t making their games inclusive enough to lgqtb and women
3. Studios aren’t doing enough climate change activism
4. Studios aren’t offering enough extra buyable content as soon as the game releases.
5. Studios aren’t focusing enough on online multiplayer games and are doing to much single player stuff.
The list was 10 things long but I can’t remember the rest. It was all bullshit. But they were saying how they interviewed a bunch of people in the industry and this is allegedly what everyone believes is the problem. Studios are allegedly looking at Concords failure believing that is they only spent less time working on it and made it even more woke and had a bigger e-shop it would have done better.
News outlets do this all the time, with most trending issues. Explaining to us why such and such is that way, every single time leaving out the main cause. It’s deliberate obfuscation and deception.
They are right in one context. The modern audience didn't show up for Concord. It kind of makes sense that the takeaway would be to double down on everything. Granted they are completely misguided. They are trying to appeal to a group of people who don't play video games, but there is a huge untapped market there if you could just convince them to buy video games. The problem is, they literally think gaming is the worst possible hobby, and gamers are the worst kinds of people.
Yes they asked the people that are having the problems and they investigated themselves.... i've heard this one before.
i will say one thing, theyre right about the first point if nothing else. games take WAY too long to make now. a game that will sell maybe a couple hundred thousand copies are having teams put behind them and worked on for 5 years costing the company more money than it could possibly make on release
😲
We have bad writers for two main reasons. One, they have not lived life, the write life from the perspective of screen life, virtual life than actually living life in the real world. Second, we ha generation of writers that could get a professor or teacher cancelled for not applauding their (gulp) cut and paste/plagiarized/ cliche writing.
DEI is a major reason. Alot of people fail to mention this because they're afraid of not being politically correct.
MAJOR
It’s definitely the MAIN reason
Right or wrong I google whether something is woke or not before buying it
Very bold to say very true very brave
lol so many all time great games are games you would call "woke DEI"
it's not the main reason, it's just the one reason you are stuck on because you want to bring politics into games just as much as the game companies do.
Who remembers the days where you’d gone into one of those ‘gaming’ shops, the equivalent of blockbuster for DVD’s and you’d buy the game, put the disc in and away you go.
Always making sure you always save your progress on your PS1 insertable memory card 😂
11:40 it is my honest opinion that a majority of the time that player agency is removed in a lot of these situations is because the writers honestly believe that if you give the players the choice to make the "wrong decision" then you were encouraging players in those directions.
I remember the days you were excited when a big budget game came out and was worth your time to play, and now, the only reason i know whet games are being released is that they are so bad it’s almost like a “any publicity is good publicity” strategy
I don't. When did that happen?
@@Dragon-Believer long ago, in a timeline far far away
@@Dragon-Believer the golden age of Bioware
same here the expectations have dwindled down to what are the devs/creators saying about the game
@@Dragon-Believer Back when Valve still made games, Nintendo was loved, Sony was GOATed, and Blizzard wasn't a complete shartshow
Also AAA games have a bad habit of fixing fun glitches but never bothering or caring with the ones that really messed up your gameplay.
I had this glitch/bug in rise of the tomb raider. I was playing on hardest difficulty towards the end of the game and got to a checkpoint during some major action sequence. Decided to warp to different area to get one item I forgot. Got back to that checkpoint. Action-music blasting, but the game wouldn't let me progress the story anymore. It was on PS4. Tried to find a fix. No fix. Deleted the game.
Dying Light 2 for me. There's a point towards the end of the game where you need to fast travel back to the previous half of the world map, and the fast travel icons you need to select are just straight up missing. It's been like 2 years at this point and it's still just broken for me.
Tester: Hey man, you got a few bugs making the spaceships fly backwards.
Devs at Bethesda: No it's NOT! We know it works properly!
Tester: It's not working! Look at what it's doing right now!
Devs: HR will say it does!!
Tester: Dude... just fix the code, it's my job to make sure it's working properly and so far it's failing.
HR: Stop harassing the Devs.
Todd Howard: Ship it, fix it later.
Devs: *eats a greasy pizza*
Tester: I quit.
This is my theory as to why Starfield is what it is. Ego and time pressure makes Quality Control quit their jobs before getting fired for letting bugs happen in the first place. Remember, it is always the tester that is the most responsible for allowing bad games to exist. Add that accountability with peer pressure and the Devs massive ego. All the good testers will just walk away from those jobs. It's a sad perspective.
No, HR isn't involved in the development in any way, but they hire "the right" people for positions of decision making. Regarding testers and bugs, I'm pretty sure 95% of unfixed bugs were found by QA and logged, but the decision in on management to prioritise them and decide when/if to fix them.
It's the tester trying to tell the devs about problems while the devs argue about how manly the female characters jawline should look like and how many types of oppression her backstory contains.
Toxic positivity supported by HR. Looks legit
the probleme is criticism is hate/microagression so you cant critizice bad stuff because that makes you an evil patrialist or whatever they dont like.
yes and no, i work at QA, im testing games and indeed HR has no word on process, yes there are stupid testers, yes kpi is killing quality and the client sees high bug report numbers as good outcome, there is a system to assign a priority to bugs/issues, sometimes devs dont know why is something not working, and finally as long as its playable and feels good is a go, so they allow small issues to go through which is kinda understandable
but there is an important problem, the company, devs dont own timeframes, devs are being overworked and they are not precisely the enemy, there is someone above them screwing it up
A game that works at release is so rare these days it's an actual surprise when it happens. It's so rare that people give games a better review score just for that reason.
Let me explain this in simple terms. Money flows up and the shit flows down. When investors are shitting on executives, who are shitting on managers, who are shitting on developers who are shitting on customers you are not going to get good products.
The parallels between the games and television industry are insane. Massive once beloved IPs with limitless potential being milked, eroded and made for audiences that only exist on Twitter. Halo, LoTR, Star Wars are just a FEW examples - it's figuratively and literally so hard to watch.
So many things being destroyed. Lot of social engineering bs going on that ruining entertainment too as well as toxic ppl who want the things they hate changed when never belonged there in the first place
Everything we grew to love they seek to twist and destroy. It’s that simple.
@@brandonnotsowise2640 demoralization
@@danieln6700 bingo
@@danieln6700 yeah its literally cultural marxism. make everything suck
A problem is that games have gotten less complex, not more. They're advertised as more complex, and technically... sure, they're running on WAY stronger hardware that are truly limitless as far as being able to do anything you can imagine, and can have more complex physics and visuals and animation and more stuff happening at once... But the actual gameplay complexity has taken a nosedive for most major genres (as have the standards of devs, which is why 60fps minimum isn't a thing in all games on all platforms, which all current platforms are perfectly capable of). Games are more linear, have simpler combat, have less deep leveling/customization mechanics, feel shittier, are easier, have really large open worlds for no good gameplay reason (rarely is the point to have interesting, engaging exploration and finding secrets)... and so on. The very few truly great games that come out every year are the exceptions that prove the rules, and they're rarely as good as older, similar games.
QA is only a small part of the issue, the bigger issue being that games are shittier regardless of how glitchy and broken they come out as. Cyberpunk (despite being good) could've come out with no glitches at all and would still have been less complex and interesting than the game that was promised (after a 100% faked reveal trailer with a ton of awesome shit that was not in the final game and is still not in the game). And the games are shittier because of corporate meddling and overall crappier employees (a lot of which make it their mission to fuck games up for various reasons... and some which have it as their job description to fuck games up). And it's been going on for a long-ass time, much longer than people seem to think (the industry has been in the process of crashing for well over 10 years, that's partly why monetization and game prices have gotten stupider every year, companies are desperate and coming to the wrong conclusions about why it's happening).
Limitation breeds innovation.
0:18 he's at 10k now
He deserves it, good videos
Good for him
14k now
Hell yeah 👏
13:06 19:06 20:00 @AsmonTV I am game developer with 20+ years experience, and I could tell you in detail why lots of bugs isn't a QA problem. TLDR: 1. Quantity prioritized over quality. 2. Vintage development practices in gamedev, underusing automatic testing (which should be part of implementing the feature, not after-the-fact testing).
Also, bugs taking too long is part of how shaky their codebase is, and how hard it is to guarantee that the fix didn't break anything. The bugfix itself often takes like 10% or less of the time, the rest is manual testing, 90% of which should have been automated.
p.s. I also worked in free-to-play a lot, and can say that you are 100% right about how microtransactions affect design of games. Ugly default skins so premium skins sell, make a problem to sell a solution, extra currencies with funny conversion ratios, gamba, all of that.
4:40 Thank god somebody finally said it.
It's no coincidence that whenever I'm talking about political ideologies in games/movies/shows, it almost always starts with words like "ham-fisted", or "heavy handed" or "patronizing" or "slap-dashed". This wasn't done intentionally on my part, and it took years for me to realize THAT was what I was actually saying was the problem. It's not the ideology itself, it's the terrible ways in which these untalented "writers" incorporate them into said medium.
Well, the ideology itself is internally-inconsistent, highly theoretical, and impractical, so maybe it's all of those things AND a bad ideology to-boot.
@@rclaws3230 Oh, the ideology is bad. Worse, many of its tenets are so absurd that there's no way to use it as a literary device without it being ridiculous. So that's part of it, but then you also have "writers" who weren't hired because they were good at writing, but because they were activists.
The common reason stuff gets labeled woke is because it's bad and the ideology isn't helping the product's case, if they made it good, astronomically less people would complain about the ideology.
I'm going to disagree that Games have become more complex over time. Some are like what Rockstar puts out but, most of AAA games today only look complex on the surface. I would say the 6th and 7th generation of games had more going on under the hood mechanically than what we have today.
It's about all the crazy unlocks and shit now. Back in the day a game's was also the levels and beat the final boss. Now every game has like 30 grind mechanics that just add nothing to a quality story. A game like Banjo and Kazooie is lighters more simple in the design and mechanics then Something Harry potter. They are the same type of game but harry potter is sooooo much more complicated in unnecessary ways
Games are still more complex on a pound for pounds basis, but they're more focused on what matters and what sells in terms of mechanics. (DEI and demographics is a completely different discussion, im just talking mechanics here). Example: Compare GTA IV to GTA V. GTA IV is actually alot more complex in most ways and there are many videos on this. But GTA V solid infinitely more and remains more popular. Because GTA IV has more complexity but GTA V better game loops.
Couldn't agree more, AAA games are mechanically dumber and basic physics wise. Not to mention the cutscene simulator galore on Sony last 10 years with stale gameplay. Shooters regressed. Indies are the way
@@seoskimi5872 Yeah, you're right, BG 3 is bad.
@@Ralathar44name more. Almost every big franchise regressed or stagnates across all genres. That's when they are not remastering or remaking games
Modern games are just missing a few things. A few hundred million more dollars and a few more people in leadership positions with diverse backgrounds and hair colors and we'll have the perfect game.
😂
Instead we got societal preachers and cults of sexual identification.
I work in a whiskey label printing factory and the quality / kpi thing is so true, they introduced new targets for time to get the job done recently and the quality went down hill across the board....
I love making video games. But I'm afraid that if I want to play about a protagonist who is wheelchair bound (my best friend is wheelchair bound, my old teacher teaches wheelchair bound kids, my girlfriend dances with wheelchair bound kids), then even if I have it in my life, the community would label it as just ticking off a list of things I'm doing with them, when I'm not, I just want to show this world to others as an artist through video games.
I had an idea for a game in a wheelchair before, but I rejected it because I was afraid of negative criticism...
I believe when you're putting in effort, sincere about it and not just checking boxes, it shows and the audience can feel it. I'm sure they will accept your work.
Well first off, you're an indi dev, so you're less likely to push an agenda because you have a much smaller audience.
Then, if the game is good, people won't care. I'm sure most people have an 80-20 ratio between gameplay and world lore. Meaning that anything that is not linked to the gameplay is only the icing anyway.
Just don't make a good icing to cover a dump 😅
That sounds cool. I would play it
Armored Core VI covered wheelchairs in a tasteful way, tbh.
@@Kamawan0 lmao
I didn’t understand Hogwarts Legacy, how can it be so diverse long before the movies? What happened between the game and the movies, a purge of non-ethnic Brits? They must have all been banished on a mass scale. That’s at best, and at worst it’s very dark and I don’t know what they were thinking
This is why we need AAAA games...
Then UbiSoft's Skull & Bones awaits your purchase.
Nah bro, AAAAA is what we want!!!
Hahaha, nope.
And then get potentially bought out by a Chinese company....
yeah poor Ubisoft is just misunderstood..
Triple Gay games will save Halo Studios
They will need to attempt a world record orgy of As to even attempt to save it. Sadly that amount of money doesn't exist in reality.
Well I don't see anyone killing themselves over Halo being ruined, except maybe the developers when they're made redundant.
*Gaylo Studios
That's the best term I've heard
@@AO_9 Thanks
3:24 This is a big misunderstanding that took me a while to figure out for myself. The original patents were filed YEARS before, the most recent filing in like May of this year were EXTENDING the original part. It seems that Nintendo periodically does this where they refile updated versions of their patents. So while the latest filing did come out after palworld, the original patent approval came much earlier than Palworld.
I don't think it's a misunderstanding. The choice of exactly what they chose to fragment seem terribly on the nose for what palworld does.
Even if they do these kinds of things occasionally, this one seems targeted considering the timing.
And despite everyone stating nintendo "needs" to protect its ip or patents, no there is no actual need. I could probably look around and find many other things that the patent applies to, but nintendo chose to specifically fight palworld and not anyone else.
@@talkingtakotaco8611 I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by "misunderstanding" in my original post. I'm not saying that Nintendo "just happened" to refile their patents around the same time that they are suing Palworld. Yes, they are pursuing Palworld because they think they can get a lot of money out of them - I'm not claiming otherwise.
Rather, I'm saying that the patents pre-date Palworld's release and it's false to claim they only filed a patent after Palworld was created. The relevant patent for catching monsters in a 3D environment goes back at least as far as 2021 with patent JP7545191B1. In contrast, Palworld was released in January 2024 - three years after that patent was filed
Launching a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) became a popular strategy for start-up software firms in the early 2000s. To avoid early investors to get burned if no one bought the product (no market validation/market product fit yet) and allow developers time to "rapidly" improve the product based off of user feedback. IN NO WAY SHAPE OR FORM SHOULD ESTABLISHED COMPANIES WITH ESTABLISHED IPS/BRANDs ALLOW THIS THINKING TO TOUCH GAMES LIKE HALO and other popular and proven games/studios. This is what is currently happening in the gaming industry and it's unbelievable!
They"re making the games for people who dont play games or they"re making interactive movies, its Very simple
You hit the nail on the head. They’re making “cinematic experiences” because they’re wannabe directors that couldn’t get a job in Hollywood, so they end up directing a game instead.
Almost all the budget goes into their cutscenes, then the gameplay is trash made to hold together the director’s narrative and graphic artist’s unwanted self-inserts.
Life is strange was pretty good. But I liked dark souls 3 and metal gear a bit more
Before watching the video I'm gonna give my gut feeling on this. There's 2 problems:
1. Execs that look at high sales figure games, don't understand why they worked, and insist on copying surface level qualities and trend chasing.
2. Devs who push agendas too hard, instead of crafting a satisfying experience. In some extreme cases they actively hate their own audience.
In both cases, the mistake is not understanding who your audience is and what they want.
100% unrelated but imagine what would have happened with DoTA 2 if Blizzard had won the lawsuit.
Blizzard got pretty far with that one, DOTA 2 is not an acronym for legal reasons.
19:55 I do not agree with the sentence "I think QA is absolutely the problem".
Yes, there are bad actors in QA. Like in any job. BUT as a Team Leader of a QA team, working with pretty big companies around the world I just want to point out 1 thing. Not every bug, that QA finds gets fixed. Hell, sometimes not even 60% of them. And I personally, reported many CRITICAL bugs which were completely destroying the integrity of the game MANY months BEFORE the game release, which just got ignored until 2-3 months after release.
It doesn't matter how good QA is as long as Devs do not fix the bugs!
The issue with the quality of games is not only on QA but also with greedy companies that are not willing to fix issues due to "it will take too much time and too little damage to the game for it to be worth fixing now".
I also can't even count how many bugs, that were reported by me and my team ended up being features due to laziness and greediness of companies.
Indie South African dev here and thank you so much for bumping this ZA content creator up! The South African scene needs more voices that can pierce the global sphere we have such an awesome scene over here!
Thanks Asmon and thanks to the amazing community for boosting this!
They can’t write good stories because they never went through real hardship.
You are slowly seeing this in even in manga how new writers just want to do their own version of popular stories.
That has zero to with hardship and everything to do with a lack of creative spirit.
Slowly? the industry has been like that for some time now. For example, manga writers have latched onto Isekai years ago and hunderds of slop has formed as a result. You have to really dig through garbage to find the good ones.
It's okay we're all gonna have some real hardships soon, then we can tell the stories of those that survive.
Speaking of manga, this is how I feel about demon slayer. Sorry if it’s an unpopular opinion. I still watch the show and enjoy the anime’s quality but it still feels like a watered down mix of Bleach and Naruto.
To be fair, manga and anime started going downhill in quality the moment it became popular in America, bcos after that happened the Japanese authors started writing in a way that would cater to American audiences as well.
Manga/anime today is not close to being as deep as it was 10+ years ago.
I don't think that games are released incomplete because developers are lazy. I think it's because executives insist on releasing the game, even though it's not done in order to match road maps they have laid out for investors.
Holding to a schedule is not the problem. We just can't tell from the outside whether the execs hired 50 people when it would take 100 to make that schedule, then pushed out the game unfinished, or whether there were 120 people who were just lazy and only got the job half done. Either could be true, or both, and no one internally is going to be able to speak honestly about it until years later. Either way once the funding is spent, the game has to ship.
The real evil is when the whole affair is orchestrated from the beginning. When there was never a realistic plan to make the date with all promised features, because the actual plan all along was to exploit gamers. When the plan was to sell an EA game as a 1.0 release, then used day 1 sales to finish the game. I think that's what's been on the rise for the past decade.
Maybe, but there are several other reasons for releasing an unfinished game.
1- They may not want to invest more money in a game’s development, unless it proves to be successful, so they release it first.
2- They might need to release a game on a specific date, in order to meet holiday demand, or to avoid releasing alongside another game that will steal buyers.
3- If there was a campaign hyping up the game’s release, they want to release the game before the hype dies down.
There is more ofc.
In case why people are confused with the "secondary currency" talk.
Look up Japan's pachinko parlors and how those work.
I swear, these corpos found inspiration to take the CONCEPTS of how pachinko parlors work.
10000% if anyone thinks asia will save gaming.. buddy, where do you think the gambling mechanics came from? Why do you think mobile gaming is huge in asia? And all = $$$$$ gacha gambling mechanics.
It’s delibearlty making you addicted.. same with anime etc.. idol culture.. asia.. has a gambling problem.. and why so many stories have to do with gambling and the consequences of it.. because the creator lost family over it.. got screwed over by their parents from gambling, etc.. its a problme.. even in the smaller sense.. ufo catchers are gambling as well. Gotta get good.. gonna get the toy.. but to get that next chance.. gotta pay up.
You're mixing things up. The pachinko currency is used because gambling for money is prohibited, so they add an extra step. In the case of games, they use secondary currencies to disassociate the price of things from the real money value and make them look more acceptable. The concepts are different.
Example of game dev incompetence. In Starfield there's a guy named Dennys on Mars who sends you out for 5 helmets or 6 guns or whatnot. If you have two of that name of gun in your inventory marked with hotkeys IT WILL TAKE ONE OF YOURS EVEN IF YOU HAVE MANY MORE THAN REQUESTED and I reported that bug before release last year. Its still there... it isn't even a bug, its an incompetence.
A perfect example of recent half-cooked AAA software is the last WoW patch where many many guild banks were wiped and Blizzard could not or would not recover the items. If they no longer properly analyse a change and fail to test that change before release. If they no longer do backups - or if they do but don't test the restoration process then what's safe anymore? Nothing it would seem because they can get away with it.
Padda, articulate his points very well, his video editing is actually not bad. And it’s a breath of fresh air hearing someone with similar complaints, and issues with video games nowadays. If he keeps cranking out videos like this he deserves a follow.
7:15 don’t forget the two of them high fiving over the guy in wheelchair 😂
AAA Games situation is crazy
Summary of the video (Powered by NEX, an AI tool which summarizes UA-cam videos)
Key Points：
1. [Key Point 1]: Indie studios innovate, AAA publishers often disappoint.
2. [Key Point 2]: Corporate greed in gaming industry stifles creativity, innovation.
3. [Key Point 3]: Legislation needed to curb exploitative game monetization practices.
Important Details:
Here's the timeline
00:00:00 Introduction and Overview
• Speaker thanks viewers for support and views.
• Discusses the gaming industry's current state and Indie studios' innovation.
00:01:57 Corporate Greed in Gaming
• Speaker criticizes Nintendo's legal actions against Indie developers.
• Highlights the issue of corporate greed stifling creativity.
00:05:02 Politics in Games
• Discusses the integration of politics in games.
• Critiques tokenistic representation and patronizing storytelling.
00:12:24 Quality Assurance and Game Releases
• Speaker discusses the trend of unfinished game releases.
• Critiques the reliance on post-launch patches.
00:26:07 Microtransactions and Consumer Exploitation
• Speaker critiques the use of microtransactions in AAA games.
• Suggests legislation as a solution to exploitative practices.
00:36:25 Conclusion and Call to Action
• Speaker praises Indie studios and AAA companies that listen to fans.
• Emphasizes the need for legislation to address industry issues.
3:15 that is NOT what happened. they filed divisional patents which take already established patents and subdivided them into more consolidated patents. This is a scummy tactic to make patent lawsuits much harder because instead of just dealing with the 1 patent they have to deal with 4 individual patents. The original patent was filed in 2021 for pokemon archeus and the effective date on the patents that it was divided into are based on that date so they are enforceable from 2021 onwards even though they were created in 2021.
as a developer i disagree with your take on the bugs. there's a big difference between something that should have been caught with regression testing, which i would refer to as a bug to be simple, and what most games have nowadays which is features that were never in a working state and a conscious decision was made to just release it anyways. when they finally "patch" them they're not fixing bugs, they're just finishing working on it. maybe it's just me but it's really obvious when something is an intermittent maybe hardware-specific bug which is easy to tell by whether or not it affects all players. when things are broken for everyone, especially those that are easily reproducible with basic gameplay, that's just laziness.
the other problem with releasing unfinished intentionally broken games that most people don't seem to care about but i do is they're intentionally wasting your time. you paid for a product when it was supposed to be ready and after taking your money they've just bought themselves more time to finish development. we used to have midnight releases and we'd go and pick up games at midnight. if people were still doing that only to find out that the game isn't done yet and you're going to have to wait some amount of time for them to hopefully fix it they would never get away with it again let alone every single release. just because it's a digital download doesn't take away from the fact that everyone's time is valuable and i'd rather waste money than my time.
i also don't think this is the actual developers doing these things. i've never worked with a developer that wanted to release something that wasn't ready unless they were being forced to do so and it sucks. the problem is with the management that make decisions for profit at the cost of their reputation, customer trust, reviews, etc. making profit is important, but you can only exploit your customer base's trust so many times so to me i never understood the tradeoff especially for AAA studios that make their own timelines and have control over every aspect of a game.
tl;dr: unfinished features != bug
It does seem lie that.. they want the initial sales.. get to the point you don’t qualify for refund..
aka cash grab .. and ‘finish the game later’
Til you read the day1 notes from the devs and there's entire sections dedicated to "known bugs". Sometimes it's not even just a completions of unfinished content agenda in a text or forum style, it's a video release. Crunch sucks, but, to release anyway is a death-sentence.
Should be illegal to release unfinished content if you advertised the product as such, but, yes, unfinished != bug
I've never bought a battlepass let alone a game that has them, this I why I hate kids that do... Tourists destroying gaming.
Crazy how asmongold wasn’t mentioned on the song “Dupe - Drama” 😮😮😮
On the subject of Minimum Viable Product, I think the purpose of that term get's misunderstood by folks who aren't developers. MVP is hugely important because that is the point where you step back and assess the direction of the project. You need to be sure that everything is thoroughly tested and that you are delivering the desired experience even at that level. The reason for this is if you have a flawed concept, or if there are bugs in the core functions of your product, then you want to identify that early, so that your foundation is solid before you add additional complexity.
TLDR: It is not best practice to release any product at the MVP level of development (excepting perhaps early access). It's simply a hugely important milestone in the development process. Companies that are doing so are likely under no illusions that they are releasing a finished product.
I can attest that competent QA teams do uncover a whole lots of the issues; they just don't get fixed in time for many reasons (priority, time, or immensely hard to repro and fix properly). Most games are basically miracles that managed to ship. It's like a Jenga tower held together by hope and prayers. Within a day, there might be 200 changes done to the game, statistically speaking there's always a chance any of them can improve and/or make stuff worse.
Basically the only remparts against between a stable game launch and a bad one is effective management processes (which include QA), skill/experience of the team and time.
When QA is bad, it's often because the project management is even worse...
Cyberpunk did representation correctly...You have trans characters but the game doesnt need to scream it at you. They act like normal people doing normal things just how most would in real life.
Yea cos in a world like that u can edit yourself so much that being trans is old news with all the body modifications and human and machine combos.
@@danieln6700i mean.. if you really think about it.. its almost just vanity at that point.. and turning yourself into a god.. going against nature
I just don't get why a person's genital composition and sexual preference is necessary. Think of how many characters in literature that don't focus on those qualities that are amazing characters.
@@chrislevack405 its how these grown children rate their value in the world, whoever has the most labels, whoever has the most victim points. Then they have to scream it at you to make sure you. If you live your life like that, you are going to inject it into whatever media you create because its all you know.
Oh but it is in your face if you pay attention to the writing. And the stickers on the car. It's pathetic how many people glaze Cdpr for their dog game just cause they fixed some bugs and gave away some free cosmetics.
Imagine you pre-order a new type of car, but when you move the wheel to the right, the car goes to the left and the brakes are leaking fluid.
Imagine you pre-order a new type of refrigerator, but it sometimes heats up its contents instead of cooling it and sometimes it connects wrongly to the power grid, causing sparks in the plug.
Video games seem to be one of the few industries where selling incomplete products before they're even made isn't immediately destroyed by the law.
Cars have recalls all the time actually
@@skrillah6259 That's my point. There are consequences. How many game recalls beyond _Concord_ do you remember?
2:50 Wario The Kick Streamer
Do you know the bugtesting term "showstopper" ?
Ill explain. Its a bug that completly stops the player from advancing
More and more games are releasing with showstoppers and that didnt used to be the case
Showstoppers were the priorty for bug testers but nowadays developers dont care anymore
22:21 Let's be real: C - was the OLD minimum viable product. Nowadays, it's D- or even F+ in some cases. "Oh yeah the game is fundamentally broken and unplayable right now guys, but trust us - we have a roadmap. Just one more month and the game will be barely functional."
Playable - is the new MVP. Just playable. As long as it runs.
1:00 look ma im a timed comment
Bro, HOW!? This popped up perfectly at the right time!
I see you!
@@jeffreysherman8224 i think youtube do that always.
Nice mask...🤦♂️
remember the skillshot events in Skull and Bones that was like DbD's generator mechanic? AAAA games will be the new NFT
I dont understand one word you say
But I think I dont want to understand what you said
Dead By Daylight
"Woke is not capable of creating anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good"
Buggy games on launch is usually down to pressure from shareholders and publishers, trying to force devs to release games faster than they can. It kills the passion because developers aren't given enough time to make something that is good and complete, while still ticking all of the boxes needed to compete in the industry.
I would argue that triple AAA games are bad because of the customers nowadays. The majority of gamers are well aware how these studios will put out buggy and broken products and yet will proceed to pay $70 at launch and buy the game knowing full well what's about to happen. Just because companies like CD Project Red and Hello Games managed to fix their games doesn't excuse the fact that they screwed up big time at launch. The only thing worse than a clown is the fool that falls for their tricks despite knowing what a clown is known to do, and ESPECIALLY when that trick comes with a $70 price tag.
I don't mean to tell people how they should spend their hard earned money. But part of the reason why these gaming giants keep getting away by pushing out unfinished games is because of the customers themselves. Stop providing the train it's fuel and eventually it will come to a halt. Don't pre-order games and wait until about a month or so to see if it is actually worth buying.
Something that confuses me is why most developers don't just first grab assets and mechanics of what works well in the last game move it over, change details, and update it to new games theme and mechanics then work on the new stuff that you don't have yet.
Save time, money, and people.
Fromsoft and their souls/born/elden games have been doing this and its been working well. even when working on a new type of game they haven't tried much before.
Because patent. Yes, you can patent abstract idea, which is wild. Try copying "throwing-ball to catch mob" mechanic and nintendo will knock your door
@@daiwang8111
That shouldnt stop them from reusing and updateing their own assets and mechanics tho.
This day in age, if it's "triple A," it still might be shit
Still? It's guaranteed until proven otherwise. Wait at least a year so the game is fixed and buy it on sale. In meantime enjoy indie games and thousands of mods. I honestly have no idea why people still care about "triple A"
@@Korvolio couldnt agree more. I always think "shit" when i see or hear AAA. If im proven wrong ok but that is hardly ever the case
Indie is even worse.... there are 100s of indie games every year and only 1% are even close to decent. This video makes it sound like top hit indie games like BM Wukong is the standard.
Considering thier quality control Nintendo really have fucked up with pokemon. If it got half the love zelda has pal world probably wouldn't have even happened
Pokemon games are developed by gamefreak, not nintendo. Nintendo has some % shares of game freak, and licencing rights and some other stuff, but the creative (or in case of pokemon uncreative) freedom is with gamefreak. And gamefreak does the minimal amount of work to sell 20mio copies every other year. They lucked on the IP, and are milking it. I dont think gamefreak has ever done any other quality game. And pokemon games being worse than the Initial versions 25years ago, is such a sad thing.
adding 'gem' type currency is a sly way to try and keep the immersion of a game, when in reality it is immersion breaking when you use real money to buy it
i still cant believe that big companies release slop and think we dont notice. like we didnt buy the "eyes" dlc
Jesus, the ability of Asmongold to turn a 10 minutes long vídeo into a 40 min long vídeo with his nonstop inputting is something else.
It's a content mill
He is repeating what he has said thousand times before
Lol just don't watch
I'd agree if this wasn't a part of the stream. These videos are made from him streaming, it's not him just making this video to talk about this one thing. Plus, this is stuff that needs to be constantly reiterated, they're huge problems in gaming that he and the video are talking about
Remind me of garnt does
The funniest thing is that now gaming companies like EA, Ubisoft have realized all their big old IPs were and ARE the peak of the creative output and quality, where their creators loves their projects instead of looking for a bag. So now are just rehashing old classics with new "Graphics" that are usually more broken and garbage than the actual original release of the game! The magic of hiring only "Brace face" as your entire creative force.
The companies that used to push absolute bangers, now are acting like a desperate gold digger trying to paint their dead dementia riddened husbands porchse that's been rotting for the past 12 years with just a different coat of paint trying to sell it for its original value or dare I say make a profit THANK GOD they are getting bankrupt they just have to get used to not having jobs OR money. Also they somehow broke the transmission painting just sucks but they are getting what they deserve.
when you as a company for any game focus on inclusivity representation instead of world building and script writing you deserve to fail
They are bad writers who also lack the education and experience to know that they are bad writers. I at least know I'm a bad writer for stories and fantasy. Give me something technical and I'll make your eyeballs hear smells... If you know you're bad at something you can plan out ahead the steps, guides and mechanical approach to do it competently. These writers now don't even have the technical skill to plan writing or even follow basic character developmental techniques that have been in print for over 100 years - they don't even think to look at such guides.
12:52 this is not a good excuse at all, Black myth wukong came out fixed, so as stellar blade
I agree with most things Asmon says. But one thing I don't is when he said if a game is good and has DEI or woke, it will still sell well. It won't. Gamers don't like this sht full top.
He argued that point with Cyberpunk or BG3. But they weren't advertised as such and only has woke if you chose to with choices in game.
That being said, games that have body type 1 and 2 are a joke. Revert them back to male and female. If men and women are so alike, why are body type 2 covered? Hypocrits 🤦♂️
I think it’s true tho. But dei and woke is virtue signalling vs a studio that really believes this stuff.. it’s not really woke.. if you actually practice and believe it.. and there has been good games with this stuff..
it is what it is. Peopel need to toe with their wallets..
It depends on how much the woke was allowed to fester. Take BG3 for example, you have bullshit like pronouns and some stuff, but you ALSO have super-sexy characters, waifus, stuff that appeals to normal people. BG3 did it right by having BOTH sides, unlike shit like Concord who went 100% one side and ignore the other.
@@npcimknot958 you got it backwards. Dei and woke is not just virtue signalling but the vast majority of people don't stand behind the ideology and only go through the notion to not get cancelled. People who are convinced of the ideology and push it with actual conviction are absolutely woke. Even more so than the people who just pay lip service.
@@Mant111bg3 has pronouns? Explain that. Who is bg3 is a trans or nonbinary “they/them”? I’m in chapter 2 and haven’t come across that
i loved Spec OPs the line, memorable game and intense story
Hopefully Ubisoft's self-inflicted downfall will positively influence future games to prioritize optimization, quality and gameplay over "diverse" and "inclusive" incentives.
They'll all be fixed once they get sold to China. Then you'll understand.
31:25 Consumer protection agencies across the EU filed an official complaint just last week, petitioning for secondary currencies purchasable with real money to become illegal. It might happen, it might not, but it is on the radar of some pretty heavy players. Their 56 page report is called "Getting played: the true cost of virtual currency", and it's worth a read.
I like this guy's videos well enough, but I felt like I had deja vu for most of the video; mostly saying the same shit everyone else has been saying, just condensed into two videos with clean editing. All the same, I appreciate Asmongold for supporting smaller channels.
The situation is like:
Fine>starting to be sick>illness>extreme illness>starting to recover>fine again
I think “gaming” is in extreme illness situation right now, soon we will find out.
Things will change when people don’t buy it. And agree, don’t even play it (or pirate it).
I hate regulations from the government. It's often turned into a industry with billions of your dollars disappearing. But I'm against gambling for children.
Dude who cares? Children arent gambling. They dont have the money. Very rarely do parents enable it, and honestly, its their problem. I don't care at all if it ruins their lives. It doesnt effect me.
@@An.Unsought.Thought What were you wanting to portray with your comment? You don't care but felt the need to share your opinion. Kids buy loot boxes and similar items. It's plainly conditiong for gambling.
@@GSXR750ization Kids get the money from parents. If the parents keep giving them money, what's the problem exactly?
2:25 I, on the other hand, would love to see a Waluigi game that acts like a buddy cop, where he is a detective and has Daisy as his partner.
early access models can work great. some of my favorite games have used it (hades, valheim, enshrouded). the issue isnt releasing unfinished games. its the lying about. If AAA studio were honest and just openly embraced an early access model I think this would be way less of an issue. Some people love getting to see the game develop and the people that dont are informed and can wait for 1.0. the truth is most AAA is an early access release and they are just not advertising it that way like the indie studios that use the early access model are.
When you openly say thats what youre doing people tend to be less mad and better informed. Its when you are using an early access model and not disclosing it that is the problem and that is what is happening in AAA. why are AAA studio allowed to not disclose it? Indie studios using an early access model have a big disclaimer flagged on the steam store page making sure you know thats what they are doing and that is what you are buying. If AAA did the same, I bet there'd be less animosity about it. Super fans would still buy and feel okay about it because they were informed and would enjoy getting to see the game develop over time.
Asmon is wrong about the secondary currencies. They're not there ONLY to confuse the customer. They are also a way for the developer to have time-limited sales for the packages of the currency, where you can obtain the same amount for less cash, and then even long after the sale has expired, your currency has the same value as it would have if you had bought it at full price.
So I think secondary currencies are fine, as long as the developers can justify it with a reasonable schedule of sales for the currency packs.
You could do that without secondary currencies.
Simply make an offer "Charge your account with $50 and we'll add $25 for free!"
Or keep it simple making the conversion rate 1:1 with you secondary currencies
If they aren’t there to obscure costs. Then why is it always odd numbers? Example: 40 dollar pack for 1200 points, dlc costs 1000 now you have 200 points leftover and it makes you want to spend more money to use the leftover points. Why not just directly say the price value on the skins themselves?
Why don’t all games have direct conversions,
10 dollars for 100 points
20 for 200 points etc etc
Also, these secondary currencies have no value outside of the game. So if you have 20 dollars worth of points leftover there’s no way you can refund it or get your money back and it’s stuck on your account forever.
@@kyvian251 I said they're not there ONLY to obscure costs. I never denied that was one of the reasons they do it.
@@kyvian251 Spending 20 dollars to have 20 dollars in an account you can't refund is not a single bit different than spending 20 dollars for gems/doohickeys that you can't refund in your account.
Imagine if that dude as a new youtuber gets asmon to react to all his videos lol? No pressure mate xD
Nope. He will run out of content too quickly.
Who cares, he has a full time job anyway and YT is not his life time goal@@justinmadrid8712
@@justinmadrid8712 You don't say? Weird how I said No pressure mate ha?
@@UmbrageousZX I just meant that he pretty much covered like 10 years of content in two videos lol.
AAA shit, here we go again...
19:25 That cow dances better than Ray Gun at the olympics 😂😂😂